Love The People You Lead

This delicate sculpture by Atang Tshikare will make your heart smile. He created it in the heart of lockdown. It speaks of life, of growth, of the possibility of renewal. I thought we all need to be reminded of that possibility.

In all the talk of leadership and strategy, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that at the heart of organisations are people, and people love to be loved and love to have purpose. It just is. It has always been so. Great leaders are able to tap into these truths to create magic.

/ STRATEGY

Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), Jonathan Rosenberg (advisor to the Alphabet management team) and Alan Eagle (a director at Google) wrote the Trillion Dollar Coach.

The book is both a tribute to Bill Campbell and captures his leadership philosophy.

Campbell was a Silicon Valley legend. He started life as a football coach before segueing into corporate life, where he – amongst other roles – was the CEO of Intuit, coached the Google executive team and was a trusted advisor to both Schmidt and Steve Jobs.

The title of the book comes from the fact that the authors estimate that was the value of the companies that Campbell coached.

Reflecting on Campbell, they say, “He was a superb business executive. And he did it through…operational excellence, putting people first, being decisive, communicating well, knowing how to get the most out of even the most challenging people, focusing on product excellence, and treating people well when they are let go.”

It is a great practical guide to leadership. It is the kind of wisdom that comes from decades of doing.

They say, “To care about people you have to care about people.”

I am often confounded by the corporate-speak of job descriptions, KPIs, restructures all under the rubric of ‘people’, missing this fundamental fact – “To care about people you have to care about people”. Start there. The rest follows.

In a chapter entitled “The Power of Love”, they reflect, “this is what we learned from Bill: that it’s okay to love. That the people in your team are people, that the whole team becomes stronger when you break down the walls between the professional and human personas and embrace the whole person with love.”

The irony of adopting this approach is that, “Academic studies point out that there is a “compensation effect” between warmth and competence: people tend to assume that people who are warm are incompetent and those who are cold, competent.”

Leading with love unequivocally helps build psychological safety, which builds trust, which is the foundation of innovation, creativity, and commitment – “Academic research, as usual, bears this out, showing that an organization full of the type of “companionate love” that Bill demonstrated (caring, affectionate) will have higher employee satisfaction and teamwork, lower absenteeism, and better team performance.”

You can read more about this in “What Google Learned From Its Quest To Build The Perfect Team.”

If you lead with caring, you just have to work harder to build and protect your reputation.

In a peculiar way it becomes exponential. You’re embodying a leadership style that enables your teams to outperform so you’ve already got momentum and then you’re working harder to deal with a prevailing culture that celebrates coldness, so you’re also out-delivering there. Over time, you pull ahead.

The authors explore Campbell’s coaching style, which was loving, built off your strengths and pushed you for more. Sometimes, the love was tough.

Ronnie Lott, an NFL player who had been coached by Campbell reflected, “Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better. They relish creating an environment where you get more out of yourself. Coaches are like great artists getting the stroke exactly right on a painting. They are painting relationships. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how they are going to make someone else better. But that’s what coaches do.”

Rosenberg reflects on a moment where he was in the running to take over the Google Product Team. Campbell asked him whether or not he was coachable. His response? “It depends on the coach.”

In that moment Rosenberg encountered the fact that good coaches can be tough, Campbell retorted, “Smart alecks are not coachable” and stood up to leave.

Rosenberg panicked and tried to rescue the situation, pulling this Tom Landry quotation from his memory, “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.”

Sometimes to make a team or a person better, you need to be able to draw a line. Being tough is much easier and more effective when they know it comes from a place of love, that you are genuinely committed to them doing better.

And good leaders, coach. In Campbell’s terms this meant:

• It’s about the people.
• Lead with empathy.
• Be present.
• To care about people, care about people.
• Fix the team before the problem.
• Leaders lead.
• Have a plan and be realistic.
• Be honest.
• Build your team’s courage.
• Decisions aren’t about consensus, and
• TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.

Read the book. It’s worth it.

This Fast Company article is a good introduction to his way of working.

/ SELF

In last week’s letter, I had shared a fair amount of Jerry Colonna’s book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.

Today’s ‘self’ also draws from Reboot. I have been holding this quotation ever since I first read it:

“How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”

It is not something that we often want to acknowledge; our role in creating the conditions that frustrate us. This cartoon is a great illustration of the point.

By discovering where we are ‘complicit’, we find the levers that we can pull to change those conditions.

/ SOUL

Charting our future is always richer when we understand our history.

For this reason, I loved discovering Ubuntu Archives, an Instagram account that “celebrates and documents Black South Africa’s rich history.” It’s well worth following.

Karl

(This letter was first published on 20 September 2020).